Search results for "Management Science and Operations Research"
showing 7 items of 707 documents
Brand social representations: strategic perspectives for a fitness club
2009
International audience; The aim of this study was to identify an accurate tool to enable fitness club managers to discover those opinions or stereotypes which represent obstacles to joining their organisations. Starting with brand image, the analysis then considered social representations as relevant constructs for apprehending these opinions or prejudices. The use of a word association task and the model of basic cognitive schemes (Rouquette, 1990; 1994) provided access to the salient elements of the social representations of a particular sport brand and the way they are structured. The procedure combining these two stages represented a diagnostic tool for identifying the attractive and un…
E-NAUTILUS: A decision support system for complex multiobjective optimization problems based on the NAUTILUS method
2015
Interactive multiobjective optimization methods cannot necessarily be easily used when (industrial) multiobjective optimization problems are involved. There are at least two important factors to be considered with any interactive method: computationally expensive functions and aspects of human behavior. In this paper, we propose a method based on the existing NAUTILUS method and call it the Enhanced NAUTILUS (E-NAUTILUS) method. This method borrows the motivation of NAUTILUS along with the human aspects related to avoiding trading-off and anchoring bias and extends its applicability for computationally expensive multiobjective optimization problems. In the E-NAUTILUS method, a set of Pareto…
Interactive Multiple Criteria Decision Making based on preference driven Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization with controllable accuracy
2012
Abstract We present an approach to interactive Multiple Criteria Decision Making based on preference driven Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization with controllable accuracy. The approach relies on formulae for lower and upper bounds on coordinates of the outcome of an arbitrary efficient variant corresponding to preference information expressed by the Decision Maker. In contrast to earlier works on that subject, here lower and upper bounds can be calculated and their accuracy controlled entirely within evolutionary computation framework. This is made possible by exploration of not only the region of feasible variants – a standard within evolutionary optimization, but also the region of i…
Are quality management practices enough to improve process innovation?
2015
The popularity of quality management as a system for continuous improvement has not been accompanied by deep theoretical understanding of its effects on process innovation. In this work, the resource-based view serves as the basis for the construction of a model designed to explain the effects of quality management practices (QMP) on process innovation performance and the mediating role of dynamic capabilities in this relationship. The empirical data were analysed using the structural equation modelling technique by examining 6 competing models that represent full, partial mediation and non-mediation relationships on a sample of 550 Spanish industrial companies. The findings indicate that t…
A two-phase insertion technique of unexpected customers for a dynamic dial-a-ride problem
2006
Abstract This work deals with a dynamic dial-a-ride problem with time window constraints. In particular, new unplanned requests for service may arise at a vehicle stop and the driver must decide in real-time whether to accept or reject them. For this problem, we have developed a two-phase insertion algorithm based on route perturbations: the first phase, which is run off-line when the vehicle moves between two successive stops, aims at creating a feasible neighborhood of the current route; while the second phase, which is run in real-time every time a new request occurs, inserts, when possible, the delivery stop of the new customer in the current route.
Minimizing fleet operating costs for a container transportation company
2006
Abstract This paper focuses on a fleet management problem that arises in container trucking industry. From the container transportation company perspective, the present and future operating costs to minimize can be divided in three components: the routing costs, the resource (i.e., driver and truck) assignment costs and the container repositioning costs (i.e., the costs of restoring a given container fleet distribution over the serviced territory, as requested by the shippers that own the containers). This real-world problem has been modeled as an integer programming problem. The proposed solution approach is based on the decomposition of this problem in three simpler sub-problems associate…
Psychological contract profiles among permanent and temporary agency workers
2016
Purpose– Based on the psychological contract (PC) theory, the purpose of this paper is to identify PC profiles, differentiating between permanent and temporary agency workers (TAW). Moreover, the authors analyzed whether different profiles presented different levels of work engagement.Design/methodology/approach– A cross-sectional survey data analysis of 2,867 workers, of whom 1,046 were TAW, was analyzed using latent profile analyses.Findings– Four PC profiles were identified, which differed quantitatively in terms of the overall dimension levels (i.e. balanced, relational and transactional) for PC (i.e. content and fulfillment). ANCOVAs showed that the relational/balanced dominant and tra…